Event Detail

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

More Americans live in suburbs than in centers of cities, but how
do we understand and define diverse suburban landscapes? Hayden
analyzes historic patterns of land use and vernacular building
since 1820 to document seven common types of suburbs: borderlands,
picturesque enclaves, streetcar buildouts, mail-order suburbs,
sitcom suburbs, edge nodes, and rural fringes. She looks at the
scale of development to distinguish between older patterns of
suburbanization and more recent sprawl supported by federal
subsidies for growth. She will consider the implications of these
historic layers in the landscape for both new construction and the
preservation of older suburbs. Dolores Hayden (Harvard GSD M.Arch
1972), Professor of Architecture, Urbanism, and American Studies at
Yale University, is the author of many major books about American
landscape history including Redesigning the American Dream: Gender,
Housing, and Family Life (1984, W.W. Norton rev. ed. 2002), winner
of an NEA award for Excellence in Design Research, the Davidoff
Award in Urban Planning, and an American Library Association
Notable Book Award. Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban
Growth, 1820-2000 (Pantheon, 2003) and A Field Guide to Sprawl
(with aerial photographs by Jim Wark, W.W. Norton, 2004) were
selected as Planetizen top ten books on urban studies. Discover
magazine chose A Field Guide to Sprawl, also the subject of a Yale
architecture exhibit, as one of their top twenty books in science.
Hayden, former president of the Urban History Association, has
taught at MIT, UCLA, and UC Berkeley, and been a fellow of the
Lincoln Institute, Radcliffe Institute, Guggenheim Foundation, and
the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at
Stanford. Her work has been widely translated and featured in The
New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, CNN and
The Diane Rehm Show. Also a widely-published poet who often writes
about the landscape, Hayden recently created a new class on "Poets'
Landscapes."